ERIC KAUFMANN: Be warned...Labour will turbo charge woke revolution (2024)

It was a remarkable moment that exposed the depth of Labour's headlong plunge into the ideological madness of the transgender cult.

Interviewed on ITV's Good Morning Britain, the party's then Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, Dawn Butler, asserted that babies are neither male or female at birth, declaring 'children are born without sex at the beginning'.

It was an unhinged statement that made a mockery of biological science.

When pressed, she continued her flight from reality by claiming that anyone who disagreed with this stance was guilty of prejudice.

'You cannot have dog-whistle transphobia,' she said, cloaking her bizarre dogma in the rhetoric of moral righteousness.

Butler's demented performance back in 2020 is hardly unique among Labour MPs, who have similarly swallowed this nonsense, as J. K. Rowlinghighlighted yesterday in a blistering critique of Labour's stance on transgenderism.

TheHarry Potter author wrote that the Left's 'lazy embrace of a quasi-religious ideology... is having calamitous consequences'.

But Labour's intellectual cowardice and linguistic contortions over the issue represent just the thin end of the wokewedge that will grip the country if it takes power.

From racially divisive obligations on employers to fulfil diversity quotas, to pernicious legislation to curtail criticism of Islamism, Labour has up its sleeve a raft of measures that will turbo-charge the woke revolution.

But it is what Labour won't say that I am convinced will give a green light to institutions from Whitehall to the judiciary to become – as activists in them so dearly wish – agents of social change. First, though, let's look at what the party does say.

Labour's election manifesto sends tacit support to social justice warriors rather than showing the restraint of a sober government-in-waiting.

A flagship policy is a new Race Equality Act, which would require firms to report regularly to the State on the racial composition of their workforces and to address any apparent disparities in pay between ethnic groups.

Of course discrimination is wrong, but Labour's method to remedy the problem risks expanding bureaucracy and fuelling anti-white and anti-male discrimination.

Labour's proposed new laws would also demand that the school curriculum be made more 'inclusive' – which would mean highlighting race, gender and sexuality differences, as well as empowering activist teachers to peddle theories about 'white privilege', 'unconscious bias' and 'decolonising' our history.

A survey I published in 2022 for the Policy Exchange think-tank shows a majority of schoolchildren are already hearing these pseudo-scientific terms in class – and this will only get worse.

A further crackdown on free speech under a Prime Minister Starmer would be inevitable, as a beefed up Online Safety Bill would censor 'hateful' conservative ideas around Islam, transgenderism and immigration.

It is likely that a new, wider definition of Islamophobia would be imposed by a Starmer government, using the terminology already adopted in Labour's own rule book.

In effect, a Muslim blasphemy law would be instituted in this country, with disastrous consequences for free expression.

Such a step, of course, would offer a bonanza for lawyers and a tool for zealots. Might criticising Koranic scriptures or levels of immigration from Muslim countries ultimately become offences?

And of the trans agenda, a Labour government would change attitudes towards the way parents and psychiatrists deal with young people with regard to taking puberty blockers, undergoing gender reassignment surgery and changing their pronouns.

We have been here before. The last Labour government, through measures such as the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act 2010, transformed the identity of Britain.

Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the obsession with diversity became a central feature of public life, while parliamentary democracy was eroded by the transfer of power to courts and unaccountable quangos.

But a Starmer Government would act as even more of a wrecking ball. After all, Sir Keir Starmer himself is a north London lawyer who has spent nearly all his career in the echo chamber of the liberal metropolitan elite.

This helps explain why he has struggled to define what a woman is, and why he 'took the knee' during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

If Starmer steps into No 10 on July 5, the forces of wokery will be unleashed.

For their part, over the past 14 years Conservative governments have been hesitant to protect British nationhood and tradition.

As the novelist Evelyn Waugh once bitterly remarked: 'The Tories have never turned the clock back a single second.'

But at least figures such as Esther McVey, the 'Minister for Common Sense', and Kemi Badenoch, the tough-minded Business Secretary, have acted as a brake on the worst excesses of the new progressive dogma.

If they go, and the likes of Starmer and the Orwellian double-speaking Dawn Butler and her successor Anneliese Dodds are in charge, there would be no restraints.

Who among the Labour ranks would speak against rampant wokery? So far, none have.

In fact, any criticism of the creed has been dismissed by Labour figures as Tories 'whipping up the culture wars'.

Under a Labour government, activist employees and administrators in the judiciary, schools, the police, the Civil Service, the Armed Forces and universities would be emboldened to make a fresh push on equity initiatives, diversity training programmes and speech codes.

The equality industry and the fees of inclusion consultants would mushroom. Obtaining official approval for a changed gender identity would become easier.

I know, to my own cost, how intolerant activism can set the tone in institutions. In my willingness to challenge the pieties of the woke creed, I was accused by some at Birkbeck, University of London, of creating 'a hostile environment' for students and damaging morale.

Though such charges were baseless, few fellow academics were willing to give me open support, a reflection of the strength of the herd instinct in overwhelmingly Left-liberal social science faculties.

Fortunately I found an alternative post at the University of Buckingham, where the principle of free speech is enshrined as part of its founding ethos.

In my new book Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced A Cultural Revolution, I define 'woke' as the veneration of groups historically disadvantaged by race, gender and sexual identity.

Drawing a halo of sanctity around these groups creates a form of religion, making rational debate impossible.

Supporting diversity, equality and inclusion becomes a badge of virtue, with criticism deemed a form of heresy.

Such an ideology has already suffocated public institutions enough as they turn themselves into instruments of social engineering and mass indoctrination.

But with the prospect of a Labour government, Britain hasn't seen anything yet, as Ms Rowling bravely alludes to.

Sir Keir loves to talk of his 'missions'. The most fervent of those missions would be a dream for the woke activists – but I fear it would be a nightmare for Britain.